Ron Paul: Newt Gingrich Is Part of the Problem; He Lives off the Government and the People

Transcript

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Laura Ingraham: President Obama met some leaders of the European Union at the White House to talk about the threat of a financially collapse in Europe.

TV Voice: The biggest thing is Europe’s economic crisis.

Barack Obama: If Europe is contracting or if Europe is having difficulties, then it’s much more difficult for us to create good jobs here at home, because we send so many of our products and services to Europe, it is such an important trading partner for us.

Laura Ingraham: You are listening to the Laura Ingraham Show. Yesterday, the world’s major central banks launched a, well, joint action to provide cheap money to Europe to prop it up, meaning the Federal Reserve decided to ease its lending. The dollar is cheaper in Europe, meaning what? At the end of the day, the market goes up 450 points; and in the end, with your money, the dollar is devalued. Europe helped, the dollar goes down even further. How is this good for America in the short term or the long term? Joining us now is Congressman Ron Paul, presidential candidate, Texas Republican, and a man who basically has a …. is it true, Congressman Paul, that you have a voodoo doll with the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, and the pins go in everyday at the end of the day? How are you, sir?

Ron Paul: No, that’s a rumor, that’s not true.

Laura Ingraham: You should sell them, though.

Ron Paul: On day before the committee, they know where I stand.

Laura Ingraham: I got you. Well, congressman, tell us in really simple terms, easy to understand terms: what happened yesterday? So the folks listening in Denver and Jacksonville, Florida, and all round this country, can process it and understand how it works for them, or doesn’t work for them.

Ron Paul: Well, we are in a worldwide debt crisis, and our dollar is in bad shape and we’re in a debt crisis. But what they agreed to is our dollar would bail out the whole world, which means that they’re going to print a lot more money, create more credit, devalue our currency. And the only reason they can get away with this, is that the dollar has been the reserve standard of the world for 40 years, and they’re still a bit of trust in it because all the other currencies are less trustworthy, and they won’t consider real money like gold or silver. So, therefore, as long as that trusts lasts, the burden will be on the dollar, which means the burden will be on the American tax payer as we bail out those holders of sovereign debt, as well as the banks. So this is bad news for us, especially bad news for our consumers, and the individuals in this country , but good news for the bankers because it, once again, looks like they’re going to get bailed out, just like they were in 2008 and 2009.

Laura Ingraham: And so, in the long term, for the American families out there, so many of whom we’ve heard from on our show, Congressman Paul, who are really hurting this holidays season, families that are in deep financial crisis and very anxiety-ridden. I’m sensing the stress among people, not just the usual Christmas stress, but the stress of being worried about their children in college and how they’re going to pay for healthcare and prescriptions and so forth. For them, what does it mean for our way of life down the road with the increasingly devalued dollar on the international scene?

Ron Paul: Their standard of living is going down. We lived for 40 years, essentially, above our means and beyond our means, so now we have to live beneath our means, so it’s a real tragedy. But the real tragedy is that middle classes get wiped out when they destroy a currency, and that’s what we’re witnessing. Actually it’s just the beginning, it’s been going on for nearly 10 years, but it’s still in the early stages. And then towards the end, it moves more rapidly and that’s when you have runaway inflation. So the standard of living will go down, the people on fixed incomes, the people getting Social Security already know this, and you’re hearing from them.

Laura Ingraham: Yes.

Ron Paul: Eventually, all this effort to increase benefits and send out more money and raise up more debt actually is a catch 22, because it makes things worse. In the early stages, if you print money and run up debt, it seems to help us get out of recessions, but eventually, it does exactly the opposite. And that’s why this recession/depression is so much different, because the more they spend money, and the more they print money, the worse our problems are going to get and the longer our recovery will be delayed. And that’s what we’re witnessing right now.

Laura Ingraham: Okay, so it’s a band-aid on a festering sore?

Ron Paul: That is exactly right, and in Washington they’re totally blind to this. They talk about cutting spending, but there are no cuts. And they’re pretending that there’s not a debt crisis, too many people have accepted the notion (Left and Right) that the deficits matter. Deficits do matter, debt does matter, living beyond our means matters. And this is the reason I have been rather bold in proposing that we could cut a trillion dollars in one year, and that’s what we have to do. But right now, they think that printing money and more debt is going to solve our problem.

Laura Ingraham: Well, so far in , and I might have missed something, but I haven’t seen a lot from either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich on this specific idea of a European bailout. And we saw a partial move towards a bailout yesterday by our Federal Reserve and other international banking institutions. But, why do you think they’re not addressing at least – again, maybe something has been said that I’ve missed, but I don’t hear any consistent line from pretty much anyone. I mean, you’ve been talking about this for decades, but on this issues, let’s start with Gingrich: where do you think he would be on this?

Ron Paul: Well, he would support it because he supported the TARP bailouts and other things before. And I don’t think he, or any of the other ones, have been truly exposed to Austrian free market economics. In many ways, they are variant, or if not true Keynesians, and they believe this. So you hear this in the debates, you can tell where they’re coming from because they don’t challenge the monetary system. So they probably are quiet because they would have to, in many ways, endorse it because they support that type of system. So, I don’t think you’ll hear any of them say, “No more bailouts, you have to do it, they’re too big to fail, it’s going to cause a crisis”, and it would, it would be a crisis for the banks and it would be a crisis for countries like Greece and Italy, they would have to default. So they don’t want to be on that side of it.

Laura Ingraham: But, Congressman Paul, Gingrich has said consistently, has he not, that the Fed should be audited and there should be a tougher stance against the Fed. And I know you just released a fairly tough ad other has gone viral on the internet against Gingrich. But what specifically about Gingrich gets under your [skin]? If the one main criticism that Ron Paul has against Newt Gingrich, what would it be?

Ron Paul: It’s probably his flip-flopping and being on different positions. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac really bothers me, when you think about how much money he got for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that’s really the (?) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a government agency, because even though they were weren’t getting the money directly, they were getting benefits and the people made a lot of money, the executives made a lot of money. But, in a way, I see him as an executive making millions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and therefore, people should know that he’s part of the problem. How can he be the solution if he lived off Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, how can he be wanting to really clean up that mess if he’s received so much money from them?

Laura Ingraham: Well, he said he wasn’t a lobbyist, he didn’t lobby and he made that clear in all of his contracts.

Ron Paul : Well, it’s legal to lobby, so I don’t know if it’s a matter of semantics. What was he giving them, I mean, it was influencing contacts. Even if he wasn’t doing any of that, he was still an employee, you know. So we had to bail them out, matter of fact, they’re still getting bailed out. In the last quarter, they still lost a lot of money. So indirectly, we’re paying up. Literally I believe that Gingrich was able to benefit by the bailouts because some of that money that they lost was taken up by the tax payers. So he benefitted before it was recognized where those funds were really coming from.

Laura Ingraham: Do you think Newt Gingrich should give back the money he made from those institutions?

Ron Paul: Well, that would be a complex issue, because probably under the law, the law doesn’t make anything that he did illegal.

Laura Ingraham: Right, that’s my point. It’s not illegal, so you’re just calling him a hypocrite.

Ron Paul: Hypocrisy, inconsistent, willing to live off the government and government agencies like this to promote policies that I think are not good for our country.

Laura Ingraham: Is Newt Gingrich a conservative?

Ron Paul: I wouldn’t put him in that category. He was known to be from the left-wing party, especially early in his years he would come up with a conservative viewpoints and all, but that doesn’t make him a conservative. No, I don’t put him in that category.

Laura Ingraham: Why do you think he’s surging across the country?

Ron Paul: Well, it’s hard to say. If you look at the last 4 people that surged across the country, it seems like they get some media attention. And I think it is more a reflection on the people and the way polling goes, rather than a true fact that all of a sudden he’s endorsed by these 9 people. But just think of how many candidates now have surged, they got a lot of media attention, and they say “Oh, this guy is going to beat Romney” and then they drop off. So it remains to be seen how long this lasts.

Laura Ingraham: He’s not Herman Cain, though, right? He’s quite a bit different from Herman Cain or even Michele Bachmann. I mean, he’s been through the fire, has he not?

Ron Paul: Yea, and I think that’s one thing he’s benefiting by. Everybody knows so much of what he’s done in the past. But I still think the policy flip-flopping deserves to be known by the people, on where he stands on these issues.

Laura Ingraham: And, Congressman Paul, how do you, given the electoral layout that exists today, starting with the Iowa caucuses where people are predicting that you’re going to do quite well. A lot of friends of mine who live in Iowa expect you to do quite well in the causes, and you could even win the Iowa caucuses. How do you, from there, assuming you show quite well, put together a strategy to capture this nomination and go on to competing against Barack Obama?

Ron Paul: Well, I’m not good at changing strategies, because, in many ways, I’ve been campaigning for the things I believe in for 30 years, and my strategy has always been to argue the case for individual liberty and constitutional government and a different foreign policy, and protection of civil liberties. So I continue to do the same thing as strategy. It also involves what we’re doing in Iowa right now and New Hampshire. And your question is, “What do we do after that?” Well, I continue to do the same thing and then if we’re doing well, we will have momentum. We obviously have to, and will, benefit by even easier fundraising, our fundraising has always gone pretty well. But we’re spending a lot of money right now in Iowa and New Hampshire, and I think that’s why we’re doing well. But then it will be a different and a much bigger campaign come February, because we’re going to have to be addressing many, many, states, we’re having super-Tuesday and all these things. So yea, it will be a challenge. But as far as I’m concerned, we have to just do exactly what we’re doing, we have to stick with the message, we have to just do more of what we’ve been doing.

Laura Ingraham: You know what I noticed about you over the years, and my dad was a fan of yours back in the early 1980s, late 1970s. I noticed that you don’t really get petulant or prickly with the media, and there is concern that Mitt Romney, underneath it all, gets very petulant. And my Facebook crowd here is saying that the word, imperious” even. Do you notice that about Romney when you spend time with him up on stage, or do you notice anything like that?

Ron Paul: I haven’t noticed that too much. Or you mean maybe the way he deals with the interviews, in our debates. I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention, I don’t know whether I would have volunteered that or not. But you’d probably have a more accurate opinion than I do.

Laura Ingraham: Well, you don’t seem to get phased by the questions that are thrown at you, it’s kind of even keel, steely-eyed approach to these questions, which I think a lot of people like. Congressman, we really appreciate you joining us in the analysis of what’s happening with the Fed and how this temporary juicing of the markets always comes back to bite us, always comes back to bite us.

Ron Paul: It surely will, wait till next year, and you’ll see the real consequences.

Laura Ingraham: Alright, we appreciate it. Ron Paul on the Laura Ingraham show, candidate for the presidency, Republican nomination, Texas Republican. And when we come back, the Huntsmen daughters strike back at Art and Soul.

TV Voice: Ron Paul has been consistently correct.

Radio Voice: The Laura Ingraham Show.

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